The present invention relates to a method for non-destructive testing of structural material, including particularly fiber reinforced compound products and using x-ray testing and detector imaging.
Non-destructive methods for testing of fiber reinforced structural materials, including particularly compound elements under utilization of x-rays is basically a known procedure. Such a method usually ascertains the so-called coarse structure or texture of the compound system. On the other hand, x-rays are known to be amenable towards the detection of density differences in test objects generally so that there is no reason that compound parts should not be tested towards irregularities in terms of density differences.
However, compound components with fiber reinforcement has the particular property in that the density of fibers on one hand, and the density of the resin binder (host material) on the other hand, are quite similar so that similar overall density may be represented by a high as well as by a low content of fibers. Therefore, x-ray testing of such parts under consideration of coarse texture aspects will not yield significant and adequately unambiguous density distributions in terms of fiber versus binder. For example, local bunching and local depletion of fibers hardly show up in such a test. Therefore, such a texture investigation will not be sufficiently accurate concerning the integrity of the tested part.